Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Esquire's Charles P. Pierce wrote this last week after the attack on a Georgia courthouse by Dennis Marx, yet another paranoid nut with too much ammunition -- and gets to what's driving that paranoia. It also applies to the right-wingers who killed two cops in a Las Vegas restaurant this weekend who talked of starting a revolution...

Goddammit, enough already. Enough with coddling dangerous people and their dangerous ideas. This isn't about free speech. Marx had every right to stand on the streetcorner and howl at his personal paranoid moon. This is about people who are arming themselves heavily and taking action against enemies that far too many people in this country get rich telling them that they have. Too many guns is only the most obvious symptom. The disease is the industry of making people turn against their country, and their fellow citizens, for profit. In fact, the difference between what those soulless bastards do, and the broadcast that got Anwar al-Awlaki -- and his teenaged son -- killed in Yemen, is so slim as to be invisible.Let's not kid outselves. This guy is a product of more than his own psychoses. He is a product of a conservative movement that has lost its moral bearings, a gun culture than imbibes paranoia the way some people drink iced tea, a media infrastructure -- from Roger Ailes's empire through the poison from which Clear Channel and other media conglomerate profit, all the way down to the guys broadcasting on short-wave from their root cellars in upper Michigan -- that enables and encourages and empowers armed political paranoia and does so for the cheapest possible reasons, for political power and for corporate profit. And, no, Both Sides do not do this. There is nothing comparable on the Left to the vast ideological bunker of the mind that has been created and sustained by the institutions of modern conservatism within which Dennis Marx found a home. In a week in which Bowe Bergdahl has been slandered for cheap points and cheaper laughs, the emergence (once again) of an actual American terrorist should be a very sobering moment.